4. Wie Literatur Räume konstruiert und erfahrbar macht

Theoretical Shift

Literature was traditionally seen as a "temporal art" (sequential) versus visual arts as "spatial" (juxtaposition).

Spatial Turn

Occurred around the millennium, focusing on literature's active ability to produce space.

Fictional 'As-If' Spaces

Imaginary environments offering variations/alternatives to real spaces, yet actively shaping our real-world perception.

Columbus' Ship Logs Example

Demonstrates how real-world perception is shaped by literature; his spatial expectations were biased by mythological/geographical travelogues.

Modification of Real Space

Literature doesn't just copy external space; it references it to fluidize, modify, or schematize existing spatial concepts.

Chronotopos

Mikhail Bakhtin's concept where time and space intertwine; time becomes visible and space is driven by narrative/historical movement.

Text-Space Boundary Crossings

Yuri Lotman's idea that text is "movement on a map"; crossing boundaries within text-spaces produces the plot (sujet).

Literary Networks

Intertextual webs that map emotional, affective, and cultural spatial relations differently than physics or geography.

15th-17th Century Expansion Challenge

The "discovery" of America disrupted the closed, medieval Christian worldview, requiring new aesthetic forms of knowledge production.

Portuguese Expansion Advantages

Geostrategic location, centralized monarchy, presence of Italian mercantile know-how, and the end of the domestic Reconquista (1249).

Portuguese Expansion Drivers

Lack of gold, search for new grain-producing lands, and demand for labor on sugar plantations.

Cape Bojador (1434)

Sailing past it broke a massive mental barrier regarding the imagined terrors and horrors of the Southern Hemisphere.

Slave Trade Reality (1530)

By this year, roughly 10 percent of Lisbon's population was of African origin due to the expansion.

Postcolonial View of Expansion

Exposes the violent reality (between banditry and capitalism) hidden beneath the glorification found in colonial epics.

Chronicles and Epics

The dominant genres of colonial literature used to process and justify the conquest of the unknown space.

Epic Genre Benefits

Provided European readers with a familiar classical frame of reference to comprehend colonial "otherness."

Epic Genre and Violence

Allowed for a complex representation of the Conquista's violence that was not possible in factual, historical documents.

Early Modern Epic Features

Begins in medias res, high stylistic register, epic formulas, battle scenes, mythological apparatus, and the wonderful.

Alonso de Ercilla

Author of "La Araucana" (1533-1594), who participated in the Spanish conquest of Chile as an eyewitness.

La Araucana Structure

Published in three parts (1569, 1578, 1589) using octavas reales (eight 11-syllable lines per stanza).

Heroism in La Araucana

Lacks a single central hero; instead, it focuses on collective military actions and global imperial dimensions.

Praise of the Mapuche

Ercilla praises the fierce indigenous resistance to rhetorically magnify the glory of the Spanish imperial mission.

Luís Vaz de Camões

Author of "Os Lusíadas" (1524-1580), who spent 17 years in Asia/Africa and lost an eye at the conquest of Ceuta.

Os Lusíadas Structure

Portuguese national epic consisting of 10 cantos, written in ottava rima with decassílabo heróico lines.

Mythological Frame in Camões

Traces Portuguese ancestry to Lusus (companion of Bacchus) and sets Venus as the protector of their voyages.

Os Lusíadas Plot Overview

Vasco da Gama's voyage to India, weaving in past Portuguese history, a storm/shipwreck, and the Island of Love.

Os Lusíadas Ideological Message

Frames the Portuguese as noble, ritterliche, and knowledge-seeking Christian seafarers expanding the realm.

Postcolonial Critique of Camões

Exposes Eurocentric language ("novo reino"), the taming of land treated as a blank slate, and animalizing rhetoric against Muslims.

Battle of Ayacucho (1824)

Marked the final defeat of royalist Spanish forces, leading to a power vacuum and the rise of local Caudillos.

19th-Century Latin American Rift

The violent political conflict between Europeanized urban centers and the rural, agrarian-dominated interior.

Domingo Faustino Sarmiento

Argentine intellectual, exile, and later President (1869-1874); heavily influenced by romanticism and liberalism.

Facundo: Civilización y barbarie

Published in 1845 as a 25-part newspaper feuilleton analyzing Argentine political violence via the biography of Juan Facundo Quiroga.

The Evil of Extension

Sarmiento's claim that Argentina's primary geographical curse is its vast, empty, and isolating territory.

Pampa as an Anti-Social Space

The massive emptiness prevents the formation of a res publica, police, or justice, leaving only isolated feudal families.

Aesthetics of Fear in Facundo

Sarmiento uses Gothic horror techniques, dramatic staging, and tense focalization to present the Pampa as a monstrous space.

Resignation to Death

The permanent physical insecurity of the Argentine countryside breeds a stoic indifference toward violent death.

Volney Reference in Facundo

Sarmiento quotes "Les Ruines" (1791) to connect the empty Pampa to the ruins of the Euphrates, critiquing Rosas's tyranny.

Civilization (Sarmiento)

Embodied by the city: straight streets, European dress, commerce, arts, schools, and constitutional law.

Barbarism (Sarmiento)

Embodied by the desert/countryside: a raw, lawless wilderness that surrounds and oppresses the narrow urban oases.

Orientalism in Facundo

The strategic literary operation of framing the Argentine rural interior as a temporally and spatially backward "Other."

Racial Discourse in Facundo

Sarmiento explicitly labels indigenous races incapable of hard labor, comparing them negatively to clean, industrial German/Scottish colonies.

Niemandsland (No Man's Land)

A legal fiction revived in the 19th century to treat "uninhabited" deserts as empty, justifying the eradication of indigenous peoples.

Columbus' Ur-Word of Dispossession

"Non me fue contradicho" (It was not contradicted); a phrase establishing a legacy of legal erasure from 1492 through 19th-century nation-building.

Sarmiento's Rhetorical Tools

Uses hyperbole, anaphora, repetitions, organic metaphors of national "healing," and narrative time-stretching to achieve political effects.